Manage your subscription

Saturn’s biggest ring was hiding

A RING of space debris 2.4 million kilometres from edge to edge should be hard to miss, yes? Apparently not, since one this thick has been spotted orbiting Saturn. It’s the biggest ring found in our solar system so far.

The discovery seems to confirm the idea that the leading hemisphere of Saturn’s two-toned moon Iapetus is much darker than its trailing side because it has been coated with dust from collisions between debris and Saturn’s outer moons.

Anne Verbiscer of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville found the ring when she trained the Spitzer Space Telescope on a patch …